‘CO2 emissions are altering our planet, and and it will lead to humanity’s destruction unless we do something about it.’
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Some things are, to use Caroline Lucas’s word, “unforgivable”. The decision by MPs to put commercial interests ahead of the needs of our planet when it came to vote on the third runway at Heathrow represents a final, catastrophic betrayal. I had just finished a 14-day hunger strike, along with other Vote No Heathrow campaigners, to try to get across our objection to the idea. We are committed. Boris Johnson – supposedly an avowed critic of the plan – couldn’t even be bothered to turn up.

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For 30 years scientists have been making clear the catastrophic and inevitable consequences of climate change. CO2 emissions are altering our planet, and it will lead to humanity’s destruction unless we do something about it. It’s real, it’s happening – our politicians must face facts. At present temperatures have risen 1.2C. Another 0.6C of warming is locked in from already emitted carbon which has yet to increase temperatures. The arctic will likely be ice-free in the summer within the next decade and ice-free all the year round within 10 years after that. The resultant dark earth and water that will replace the reflective ice and snow will create an estimated additional half a degree of warming. These precise numbers are important, because death is not linear but binary. At a certain point you cross from life to death. So where is the line? Two degrees is the answer. As we pass this point, it is no longer possible to grow grains at scale in the centre of Russia and North America, where temperatures will increase twice as fast as the global average. Millions will starve, tens of millions of climate refugees will be heading in our direction, and the world economic system will collapse. We are hurtling towards this moment of truth.

Scientists have been telling politicians this information for three decades. It is clearly laid out in thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Continue to emit CO2 poison, and the world will become toxic. There is no planet B.

In such circumstances have a right and indeed the duty to rebel

When the British public wake up to the fact that all that they cherish and love will soon be destroyed, they will turn on the politicians that allowed this to happen. In the meantime some of us have been working for some time on saving our society. We are preparing to rebel. The Heathrow vote demonstrates that our political system is in the grip of short-term commercial interest, even though it will lead to devastating results. It cannot be reformed from within. John Locke, our greatest political philosopher, laid down a clear response – in such circumstances citizens have a right and indeed the duty to rebel. We have done it before in our history and we are going to do it again.

• Rising Up is coordinating a rebellion against the UK government for this November

• Roger Hallam is a PhD researcher on effective radical campaign design at King’s College London